A contribution to the conversation on the unique and
irreplaceable contributions of our Chairman: a few thoughts on
approach and method

Lenny Wolff is the author of the book, The
Science of Revolution,an introduction to basic principles,
analyses and methods of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

I

In recent months I've had occasion to return to What Is
To Be Done? and--coupled with study and reflection on some
other points as well, including the campaign to promote and
popularize our Chair-- it's led me to a renewed appreciation
for the almost gravitational pull of spontaneity: no matter how
high you aim to fly, if you don't fight the pull, you'll come
back down. It's worth thinking about the huge percentage of
one-time revolutionaries--both parties and individuals--who've
come crashing down on those rocks. They almost all came into
things with genuine revolutionary convictions. But one day,
after years or even decades of battle, they somehow find their
name at the bottom of a contract for a sell-out, maybe without
even being conscious of how they got to that point, or even
having signed it. That's the strength of spontaneity--quite
apart from your convictions, unless you find the ways to divert
the natural stream of things, you're gonna end up drifting
downstream to a place you once swore you'd never go.

I think one earmark of our Chairman's approach has never
been to rest content with what we've accomplished. He
ceaselessly interrogates the whole party and he interrogates
himself: Are we doing everything we can to make revolution? Are
we focusing on the right questions? Are we pushing hard
enough--or in the right direction--on the limits of the
possible? Are we looking enough at things from our final goal
back, and are we forging strong enough links between that
goal.and the many pressing tasks of today? Are we approaching
things enough from a thoroughly internationalist standpoint and
situating all our work in this belly of the beast from the
needs and struggles of the people worldwide? Are we thinking
rigorously enough about the points raised by people who don't
agree with us on strategy, but who may be on to something we
need to learn from nevertheless (a case in point on this: the
Chair's writings on George Jackson1 a few years ago)? Are we
settling for easy answers or facile approaches to complex
questions? Are we doing enough to bring forward critical
sections of our base, to develop (and learn from) the youth
around the Party, to engage with others who are out there
trying to do something positive?

This orientation of the Chairman's, I think, is one very
decisive reason why our Party has been able to not just stay on
the revolutionary road in this country, but to actually advance
on it.

II

At one point I had an exchange with the Chairman during
which we got into the question of Stalin. It's kind of
remarkable--and a problem for our movement to take up--that no
one else in the original leading core of the Bolsheviks aside
from Stalin was able to carry on as a leader of the socialist
society and that quite a few of them came into direct
opposition to its further advance. A number of them were pretty
far from Marxism on some points--Bukharin, for example. And
Stalin himself, as we've summed up, had serious shortcomings in
wielding the dialectical method.

One concentrated example of this contradiction: October
1917. Lenin basically had to threaten to resign in order to
finally get a majority of the leading Bolshevik core to approve
the October insurrection, despite having made a convincing
argument and having advanced extremely compelling arguments to
the many objections being raised to that argument. Maybe it was
some combination of the force of his political arguments, his
authority within the Party, the course of events, the actions
of a section of the masses, and a feeling that if they didn't
have Lenin in their party then their party wasn't ever gonna
lead a revolution that finally carried the day with the
majority.but, again, it's not good that it had to come to a
threat of resignation--it's not good that people could not see
what Lenin was seeing (not that everyone would necessarily see
as deeply or clearly or farsightedly into the contradictions as
Lenin, but it almost doesn't seem as if they were even looking
through the same lens), and that's a problem we need to think
about.

In going back and forth on that problem, one important point
to think about is that shortly after the outbreak of World War
I Lenin re-studied the dialectics of Hegel. He had been shocked
not so much by the outbreak of war as by the capitulation of
nine-tenths of the social-democratic parties in Europe, and he
felt compelled to "hit the books" once again. His notebooks on
Hegel can be found in Volume 38 of his Collected Works ;
they represent a re-thinking and to a certain extent a
re-fashioning of what had become Marxist philosophy and the
dialectical method (see footnote #3). It seems likely that this
re- thinking formed the basis for Lenin's very radical and
unexpected "April Theses" in 1917, when he shocked the
Bolshevik Party by calling for more or less immediate
preparations for socialist revolution (rather than a protracted
period of political work consolidating the bourgeois-democratic
revolution then in process).

Yet you don't get the feeling that Lenin opened up these
questions of method and philosophy to other leaders of the
Party and "took them with him" on this (or at least I'm not
aware of it if he did--it's not in Krupskaya2 or History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union , for instance). Of course, he may not have
had the freedom to do this, but in any event you don't get the
sense that he was able to make this method--which was the
Marxist method but which he was, again in my opinion,
re-thinking and more or less re-fashioning after his re-reading
of Hegel--the common property of the leadership and, through
them, the ranks of the entire party. (Lenin did, of course,
write an entire book on materialism when it was under attack--
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism --which I assume had a
huge impact; and, again, it may have been, with the reality of
war and the collapse of the 2nd International and the tasks
associated with those momentous events, that Lenin and the
Bolsheviks could not carve out the freedom for everyone to do
that kind of study of Hegel; but my point is that, nonetheless,
there was a gap there, particularly on dialectics, and I think
it came back to haunt the Bolsheviks.3)

I've been mulling this exchange about the Bolsheviks for a while
and, as I've been mulling it, I've gone back to something a
comrade said to me some years ago. This comrade, due to
objective problems, had been forced to cut back her
participation in Party life (including discussions), and this
situation was hard for her. Anyway, we were discussing one or
another of the Chairman's talks from the early '90s and she
remarked that whenever she reads one of the Chair's talks, she
feels as if she's being invited in to grapple with and
contribute to helping solve and answer the problems and
questions that he's raising. I think that's really true--and
part of "his approach"--and on further reflection I'd add that
he's also "taking us along" with him, giving us the opportunity
to wrangle with and wield and in so doing absorb the method
that he's developing (and to deepen it as well). This is a
point that has been well- made before--I am only elaborating on
it a little here. But I think that this "praxis" of the Chair's
has tremendous importance in light of the history of our
movement, including some of our movement's weaknesses.

III

I do think that the Chair has further extended the
philosophical contributions of Mao in particular into something
of a higher synthesis. For one thing, much of Mao's later and
most provocative philosophical thoughts--as captured in the
various unofficial collections of speeches and comments made
after 1949--as well as the philosophical implications of some
of Mao's pathbreaking political analyses and some of what was
brought forward in the Great Leap Forward and the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (e.g., class struggle under
socialism, continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of
the proletariat, the role of consciousness and the
superstructure, overcoming bourgeois right, the role of the
Party under socialism, etc.)--never were synthesized into a
coherent whole until Bob Avakian wrote Mao Tsetung's
Immortal Contributions .

While that would be significant enough in itself, the way in
which the Chair has summed up, further developed and applied
these insights actually amounts to a further contribution to
Marxist philosophy. This goes from Mao Tsetung's Immortal
Contributions through the short essay back in '81 on the
"philosophical basis of proletarian internationalism," "Conquer
the World" and the many discussions through the years on
questions of dialectics and method all the way up to the recent
talk on "Grasp Revolution, Promote Production"--where he takes
a concept and "praxis" originally developed to apply to the
economy in China and draws from it philosophical and
methodological implications that range over the relationship
between chance and causality and accident and necessity, the
universal Marxist method and particular areas of human
endeavor, learning and leading, leading and unleashing,
economics and politics, etc. etc., all in the context of
humanity's epochal struggle to understand and transform the
world. This is really good stuff--and really something new!

Returning to the remark of the comrade, and to the problem
posed (or contradiction revealed) by the shortcomings of the
Bolshevik leading core, it's imperative that we "take up the
invitation" and get as deeply as we can into wrangling with
that method and that approach, striving to make it the
(collective!) property of the people we lead, and continuing to
keep in step with and advance together with the new advances as
they are made.

IV

If you have a half-formed insight, a question, a
disagreement--if you are thinking out loud and trying out a new
idea--the Chairman will listen with a fully open ear and then
he'll challenge you to develop that insight, question, thought,
or disagreement as much as you can; he'll prod you to draw out
the further implications as fully as you can, he'll encourage
you to take the time (and the responsibility) to think it
through as rigorously as possible.

The corollary is that the Chairman won't settle for
superficiality or complacency in analyzing a phenomenon, making
a criticism, addressing a question, etc. He demands of others
what he demands of himself: that you really get deeply into a
phenomenon or argument or question, really figure out the major
contradictions in play and examine, really get inside, the
thing and take it apart very thoroughly. And on both of these
points, there is an underlying orientation: not rigor or
"excellence" apart from and above classes and class struggle,
but the fact that if we are going to do what we have to do, if
we are going to really solve the questions that are before us,
this is no mere intellectual exercise, but is something with
very high stakes for people's futures--and we have to strive to
approach every question with that in mind and live up to that
responsibility.

V

Another point on approach: the Chairman is what I would call
a comprehensive and far-reaching thinker--a mix of being
wide-ranging and all-embracing and at the same time very open
to the new and unexpected. There's an approach of ranging
widely and making connections (connections that sometimes seem
unlikely at first glance)--of being very lofty and very
grounded in the real deal, simultaneously--and of doing all
that in the service of confronting the hardest problems.

I think this approach is actually part of applying the
dialectical method (connections sparked from unexpected places
deepen an understanding of the whole process you're dealing
with) and it's materialist as well (ideas reflect material
reality, even wrong or partially correct ideas, and analyzing
such ideas--and particularly if you can (again) "get inside"
them and break them down in the manner of the Chair--can lead
to a higher synthesis, into a more fully correct understanding
of that reality--a method of no small importance).

At the same time, the Chairman's thinking is profoundly
rooted in the actual advanced practice of the class
struggle--he interrogates, analyzes and draws lessons out of
this practice from the standpoint of humanity's advance to
communism--and all this with a deep sense of the context of the
experience of the international proletariat, and in particular
the socialist states that have been brought into being through
proletarian revolution--the material necessity that confronted
people, and what they were trying to do in the face of
that.

This all-embracing, far-reaching, comprehensive orientation
is something that is not that common in our movement and in our
history--it is something that is pulled against in a thousand
different ways by the urgent press of events, the need to focus
deeply on some things, and other factors as well no doubt--but
it is something very important to strive for if we are going to
do all that we can to advance things as far as we can for our
class and our cause--and for humanity itself, whose highest
interests our class represents at this time.

___________________________________
NOTES:

1 See
"Getting Over the Two Great Humps: Further Thoughts on
Conquering the World--Rereading George Jackson," RW #968
(August 9, 1998).

3 The
impact of Lenin's battle against empirio-criticism is given
significant attention in History of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union , though it also is placed somewhat as an
introduction to what was later published as Stalin's
Dialectical and Historical Materialism , which our
Chairman characterized in Mao Tsetung's Immortal
Contributions as "being largely correct. [but] marred by a
certain amount of metaphysics"--in particular, failing to
"focus on contradiction as the basic law of materialist
dialectics" [p. 147], even though Stalin actually quotes Vol.
38 of Lenin's works. The HCPSU does not mention Lenin's
study of Hegel, so far as I could tell. And while I did not
make a recent thorough study of the whole book, a review of
Stalin's codification of Lenin's method in Foundations of
Leninism shows that Stalin tended to reduce Lenin's method
to a set of (admittedly true and very important) precepts on
the character of the parties of the Third International versus
those of the Second International [see section entitled "II.
Method," pp. 11- 19, Problems of Leninism , FLP
edition], including (in relation to the question of
philosophical method and dialectics) the need for theory to be
tested "in the crucible of the revolutionary struggle of the
masses" and for the policy of a party to be judged by its deeds
rather than its words. In at least one place in the work,
Stalin explicitly argues against and even ridicules the notion
that Lenin developed his thinking on the relationship of the
bourgeois and proletarian stages of the revolution, when faced
with unanticipated developments and novel situations. This was
probably in opposition to Trotsky's claim that Lenin united
with Trotsky's line to come up with the April Theses, but that
doesn't really justify missing the important ways in which
Lenin's thinking did develop.